Modern Antiquity: The Corner Bistro

The Corner Bistro (“The Bistro,” “Corner B.,” but seldom, almost never “Corner Bistro”) sits on the corner of West 4^th street and Jane, recondite and well-worn bricked, just where the relative structure of Chelsea’s Eighth Avenue disperses into the maze of the West Village. It is easy to miss—a simple building flagged with an unassuming neon sign glowing the words Corner Bistro— but it is always busy, always packed with locals and tourists looking for an old bar, one that embraces them with its old-time ale house ambience, one that serves really good really cheap burgers and beer ($2.50/12oz McSorley’s light or dark, $6.50 for a Bistro bacon cheeseburger), one with soul.

On weekends Corner B. turns into a zoo of college kids crowding into the narrow front room and lining up along the side wall waiting for tables in the back. The best time for a Bistro Burger is weekday afternoons, around 3 p.m., when the bar is relatively quiet and the kitchen is fast: at this hour you’re more likely to find business men loosening their ties and watching a Mets game, or a few local retirees reading the Post at the large, plate glass windows and reminiscing. Outside the window the late afternoon light stretches shadows across the sidewalk. A male couple walks by holding hands. A dog walker has trouble with his Rottweiler, wrestles it across the street against the light. A man in a blue cap opposite the Bistro pounds something out of a paper bag, then chucks it into a trash can. He hides his face in his hands, then turns to the light post and starts an animated conversation with it. Inside, with the window-light setting the air sparkling with visible dust, men (almost always mostly men) gather around their burgers and beers, this their watering hole, still intimate like an old shoe, and just as welcoming.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, Jeffrey Sheehan paces behind the wood-warm bar like a bear. His long black hair, ear-tucked, curls around his shoulders, and silver strands creep their way up his thick beard. His hazel eyes spark. He has been pacing behind this bar these ten years.

“There’s an aspect of being on stage,” says Jeff of bartending. “You’re constantly under demand. The place is really loud. And bartenders are blank screens to people. They can project whatever they want onto you.” And they do. When I first met Jeff at the Corner Bistro, I thought his stony face and brusque bar manner revealed a jaded New Yorker, someone who hated his job and hated the people drinking at his bar, and wished he were anywhere else. In reality, he is a sweet, intelligent man prone to cheek-kissing and hugs, a true conversationalist who cares deeply about his regular customers, people who show him a respect unusual in the service industry. He, like another Bistro bartender Tom (a white-haired old saint with a bouncy step, who expertly slides your mug of McSorley’s down the bar at you with a wink), sings along to the surprisingly modern Jukebox at the top of his lungs as he paces: At every occasion I’ll be ready for a funeral,/ at every occasion once more is called a funeral. Or: And I was standing on the side of the road/ rain fallin’ on my shoes/ Heading out for the East Coast/ Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through. Most of the bartenders keep a pencil behind their ears, because at the Bistro your tab is marked out on receipt paper, by hand, and then punched into old-style cash registers which might “look older than they actually are.” Most times, a third or forth beer is placed before you without your asking and free of charge. The Bistro is the kind of bar that builds a loyal following by staying the same, decade after decade after decade.

It’s early on a Saturday night, and the Bistro is busy. Burgers come flying out of the kitchen, and all along the bar sit paper plates piled high with fries and the little Belgian-style forks that accompany them. Stool hawks pack tightly behind the row of patrons drinking at the counter, ready to throw a hand down to claim a stool when someone stands to leave. A man pushes up to the bar and orders three McSorley’s, one dark and two light. He sticks a credit card between two men’s shoulders. “We don’t take cards,” gruffs Harold, who works the afternoon shift on Saturdays. “You don’t take cards?” The tone of bewilderment is familiar to Harold, who points the man at the ATM located near the Jukebox. Another woman stands on her tiptoes to get a better look at the back room, jam-packed with diners. “Is this the line?” she whines. “I can’t tell if this is the line.” Somebody has put Miles Davis on the jukebox, “ Kind of Blue,” and its soothing riffs help to mute the increasing frenzy of a weekend night’s commencement. Three different football games glow on separate television screens. Ohio State, undefeated, is being upset by Illinois, unranked. There is a raucous vibe in the Bistro. Outside the late fall temperature has dropped below forty, and passers-by hurry with collars upturned, faces in a cold wind. Inside, the bar smells like grease and beer and meat, and the jinglingly pretty notes of the old-fashioned cash registers constantly sound.

Harold stands solid in front of the requisite rows of bottles and mirrored back wall behind the bar, larger than life with a well-defined paunch and a wide, easy grin. His laugh is rocky and quick to bubble out from his kind face. He started working in the Bistro in 1967, and left it in 1975 to “pursue other careers,” optometry among them. He came back to the Bistro in 1991 because, he says, “it seemed like a more honest transaction.” It was he who hired Jeff. Harold himself started working at the Bistro under Jeff’s father and alongside Jeff’s uncle. (Jeff’s grandfather used to go to the Bistro to drink, and before that, his great grandfather did too. For good or ill, the Bistro is in Jeff’s blood.)

Saturday’s pace quickens. The energy inside the Bistro, as more and more people shove their way in, trips toward chaos. I’m outside with Jeff, who is taking a cigarette break, when a woman is hauled outside by her friends and placed on the sidewalk. She immediately falls face-forward into the street. “That’s what I call a mess in a dress,” Jeff jokes. Eventually her friends manage to hail a cab and stuff her inside before returning to the Bistro. Sheehan’s eyes glint as he puts out his cigarette. “At any other place, it would have cost her one hundred and fifty dollars to get that drunk. We did it for twenty-three.”

Jeff may not consider himself an artist, or a photographer (“I have an aversion to titles, or roles, and I’m not good at self-promoting”) but his most recent show, called “Refuge: Portraits of the Corner Bistro,” which was on view at 2/20 Gallery in Chelsea in late October, effectively evoked the atmosphere of the Corner B.

He started the project in 2001, pointing his converted Polaroid land camera at patrons who seemed steeped in old-world bar mystique. He was looking for people who “didn’t give away the time.” Shot in black and white and filled with a ghostly graininess, all the images reveal the prospective of a bartender: in the foreground one can see the bar corners, bottles and glasses half-emptied, dollar bills filling the photo edges. Most of the photos were taken before the city’s smoking ban, and the carnage of ashtrays, the smoky haze surrounding the subjects’ faces, gives an even more antiquated feel to the images. A black man sits in a suit and hat, smiling faintly into the camera. One of his eyes looks rather busted. It could be a photo from 1943. In another, a young blonde woman stares fiercely into the lens, looking trapped. In some of the images, the subjects are caught in movement: they seem to be laughing, lunging away from the camera, and their inclusion in the show gave gallery goers on opening night the distinct feeling of actually being in the Corner Bistro (a feeling exponentially increased by the number of free McSorley’s one drank). The mix of viewers was admittedly more female-heavy than most nights at the Bistro but, like the bar, the gallery was filled with laughter and easy mingling. A general buzz of goodwill and camaraderie flowed through the room. Jeff’s father smoked cigars outside under the doorframe, where a crowd of people had spilled out onto the sidewalk into the glow of a streetlamp.

Monday night, around 10:30 p.m., all’s quiet at the Bistro. I’ve claimed the best seat in the house: a stool at the short end of the bar closest to Jane Street. From here, you can see all the goings-on in the front room, including a decent view of all three televisions showing sports and a muted black and white film. Next to me, a collection of books is shoved up under a shelf along with the daily newspapers—The New Colombia Encyclopedia, the Baseball Encyclopedia, a dictionary. On the side wall a large, reddish head (made of wood? ceramic? plastic? nobody seems to know) presides over the four small tables that share a common bench, smooth with use. “Pure speculation,” says Jeff, “but if you ask me, someone gave us the head to settle a debt.” Small streetlamp-styled lights mounted on the walls give the Bistro its dim, warm-orange glow.

From the best seat in the house you look straight down the back of the bar and into the tiny square kitchen beyond, where two men in paper hats work back to back grilling burgers and frying fries. Above them on a wire rack are stacked hundreds of hamburger buns. Jeff paces towards you, then away, then back again as he works the bar. Tonight he wears his hair twisted up and held with pencils, and chews constantly on a red stirring stick. Someone he knows comes up to the bar. As they chat Jeff reaches his foot up to rest on an ice bucket at thigh level, his boot toeing a chilling Heineken bottle. His grey long-sleeved shirt is pushed back to the elbows, revealing a lotus flower tattoo on the wrist of his right arm. Every now and again, when someone tips him with coins, Jeff stands at the end of the bar and chucks each one into a metal can near the register. Those sitting at the bar collectively groan or smile when his coins miss or clink into place loudly.

The only other woman in the bar (there are twenty-plus men in the room) sits with two men at the plate glass window. “Oh bloody hell,” she quips in her British accent. The two men lean in closer. Immediately next to me Dave hunches over his ginger ale. Jeff ambles over. “Bistro Burger?” Dave shakes his head no. This comes as a shock. Dave, a robust fellow with a round face and buzzed hair who hails from New Jersey and speaks gruffly, once ate five and a half Bistro Burgers (eight ounces of beef, plus bacon and cheese in each) in one sitting. He says that Jeff taught him the trick of a “slider,” a Bistro Burger wrapped in lettuce and slid down the throat for easy consumption.

“Not today, Jeff,” says Dave. “Have to avoid the beef.” He eyes the menu hanging above the kitchen door. “Chili sounds good, though. Fuck, a bowl of chili sounds good. No. Wait. No, just give me the damn B.L.T.” Dave works in photography as well, although he calls himself the paparazzi. He shoots promos, and deals with celebrities on a regular basis. He had been at Jeff’s opening. “It was real nice, Jeff. There were real people there. It was real art. Not like the shit I have to deal with daily.” Dave efficiently works on his sandwich as he explains his past. He got his photography start in Los Angeles, working at the cheese department of a place called Mrs. Gucci’s and shooting photos on pornography sets on the side.

His sandwich gone, Dave returns his gaze to the menu. Jeff refills his ginger ale. “On the 19^th, I find out if I’m gonna die, or if I have a hemorrhoid. If it’s a hemorrhoid, I’ll be back for my Bistro Burger.” The bar back wanders over to the sink to wash dishes, and gives Dave a weird look.

“Whatsa matter?” he asks Dave, because Dave did not order a burger.

“Ah, you’re just mad I didn’t beat the record—” says Dave. (The record is six Bistro Burgers in one sitting.) Dave pauses in mid-sentence, then makes a large circle with his arms. “Hey. I saw the world’s largest burger on the Internet the other day. Thing musta been this big. Cost $125, gotta be eight, nine pounds of beef. Hey Jeff. You guys make chili cheese fries? Gimmie an order of those.”

A younger man named Junior sits down next to Dave, kitty-corner to the best seat in the house. A would-be screenwriter, he works shifts at the Trader Joe’s wine shop. A conversation about cheese fries ensues, followed by a conversation about famous people, Mailer, Dylan, Vonnegut. “Bruce Willis is kinda my hero,” Junior says at one point.

“Bruce Willis is a notorious dick,” retorts Dave. Junior points out Kristen Johnston, an actress from the television show “3rd Rock from the Sun.” She is a huge woman with a huge mouth and a pile of blonde hair. Kristen puts her hands to her eyes, making a pair of binoculars, and peers out of the window at her friends, snorting and bending over.

“She’s totally trashed,” says Junior. Later, after Dave is gone and the clock pushes toward midnight, we go out to smoke. A steady drizzle requires us to clump under the small awning. Kristen says she has a lighter in a husky tenor and offers it to Jeff before lumbering away with her friends to another bar. Jeff returns inside to finish up his shift. “By the way, Junior’s not my real name,” says Junior. “It’s Justin.” Another man named Douglas steps outside. He’s dressed in a trim black coat and black turtleneck, and is the manager of Ye Waverly Inn, which has in the past few years become a celebrity hotspot. He also happens to be Jeff’s brother, and works the odd Bistro shift when necessary.

I want to know what it is about the Bistro that keeps Jeff and his family coming back, that keeps all of us coming back. “What do you mean?” asks Douglas. “Just look at the place.” We all turn and peer into the large window at the room beyond. Our breath comes out in little steam puffs, fogging the glass—through this mist a warm glow emanates, and through the spit of rain on the awning above us, the clinking of glasses can be heard. A wet wind wraps itself around the corner of the building and we shiver, put out our cigarettes, and open the door.